In his New York Times
op-ed column on Wednesday, Thomas Friedman calls Google Earth one of the “not-so-obvious forces” behind the revolutionary fervor currently gripping the Middle East. The reason cited by Friedman: in 2006, Google made visible the opulent palaces of Bahrain’s ruling family to a populace in the grip of a housing shortage. Outrage ensued, albeit online. The inequalities were simply too striking.
Friedman doesn’t mention the most interesting aspect of this episode: The story only gained traction after Bahrain’s embarrassed sheiks, in a typically autocratic move, ordered the countries ISPs to block access to Google Earth’s imagery, in August 2006. (I wrote about the story
here and
here). The response was a perfect example of the
Streisand effect: Suddenly, everybody in Bahrain was curious about what they weren’t allowed to see. One enterprising activist took screenshots of the imagery (still available to everyone outside bahrain) and turned it into a PDF, which became an instant email hit. (You can still download it from Ogle Earth’s server via
this story). After three days, Bahrain’s rulers were
humiliated into restoring access to Google Earth.
This is just one anecdote of many that Friedman could have used — but for some reason, it is the Bahrain story that has recently been doing the rounds again, for example
in the just-launched The Daily for iPad.
What about the others? Here’s a quick tour of Google Earth’s uses in the Middle East this past half decade.
Tunisia: You know what
Google bombing is. In 2008,
activists did something similar in Google Earth, “Google Earth bombing” the palace of (now ex-) president Ben Ali with YouTube testimonies of political prisoners. Anyone who zoomed in on his palace would see geopositioned YouTube icons, each one ready to play a video detailing the nastiness of his regime.
Sudan: Sudan has had a rather schizophrenic relationship with Google Earth. For a long time, Google Earth was not available for download in Sudan — not because Sudan’s government blocked it, but because
US export restrictions made it illegal for Google to offer it. At the same time, recent satellite imagery of burned villages in Darfur as the Sudanese regime waged war on its own citizens, highlighted by Google through new default layers,
brought that conflict home in new ways to everyone except the Sudanese.
Iraq: Iraq is one of the few parts of the globe not to regularly receive new imagery in Google Earth. (Afghanistan is another). The reason for this dates back to early in 2007, when British troops in Basra said they had found CDs with screen dumps of Google Earth imagery of their camps in the local market, arguing that insurgents could use this to fine-tune their mortar attacks. Never mind that the imagery was over two years old, and that it was available for sale elsewhere: In the only proven case of active censoring by Google to date, the company
removed all post-war imagery in Iraq, replacing it with older imagery. Eventually, the imagery in question was removed from sale by other vendors as well.
Iran: Never mind that until a few weeks ago, Google Earth was
not available in Iran (US export restrictions, again): Some Iranians have long been upset that the Persian Gulf is labeled not just with that name in Google Earth… but also as the Arabian Gulf, which is the name taught in schools in the UAE and the rest of the non-Persian Gulf states. Google using both place names, with an explanation why,
simply didn’t cut it for these Iranians, and
the result was a massive online petition to demand that Google to remove the offending “Arabian Gulf” moniker. When I last checked, 1,242,141 people had signed the petition. Google’s response: A
detailed naming policy, which unsurprisingly did
not appease Iran’s foreign ministry.
Imagery in Google Earth has also been used to monitor and publicize Iran’s nuclear program. (See
here,
here,
here,
here and
here.)
Saudi Arabia: A Saudi researcher caused a stir when he used Google Earth to check whether some of Saudi Arabia’s main mosques were accurately aligned in the direction of the Qibla, i.e. Mecca, and
found that some were wanting.
Israel: Google Earth’s user-contributed layers have been used by sympathizers of the Palestinian cause to influence the narrative of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: In 2006, an exhaustive
annotated list of Israeli settlements in the West Bank was added to the Google Earth Community layer; in 2008, another layer purported to show Arab villages in Israel that had been ethnically cleansed during the war that followed Israel’s declaration of independence. One town, Kiryat Yam, was apparently added in error to the list, but that did not stop the town from
trying to sue Google for slander, while other pro-Israel interest groups accused Google of anti-Israel bias (though they did so
on ungrounded assumptions.)
Israel has long had special treatment when it comes to the resolution of publicly available satellite imagery of its territory. Due to an American law,
the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, US imagery providers cannot currently sell imagery of Israel that is better than 2 meters per pixel in resolution, which is artificially lowered from the maximum resolution available by the same satellite over the rest of the world. Israel is the only country that has this exemption. Not even US nuclear power plants have this kind of legal cover.
In sum, Google Earth has had quite an impact on the region. My own guess is that geographic awareness of the region has greatly improved, not just globally, but by Arabs themselves. On the Yemeni island of Socotra in February 2009, I walked into the only internet café in a 400km radius. The first screen I saw had Google Earth’s familiar globe on it, with rapt teenagers steering it, doing their homework. These kids’ perspectives of the world, so radically different from their parents, are one major factor driving the current revolutions in the Arab world.
